Master Projects

Master Project

Gözde Filinta

Tobias Gutmann | How the Wild Flowers Grow

  • Tobias Gutmann

21 – 22 February 2020

Tobias Gutmann | How the Wild Flowers Grow
Event #9 – Choreographing the Public

Artist: Tobias Gutmann
Curated by: Gözde Filinta

Flowers are given to loved ones, in un-ordinary days carrying love, affection, sorrow, apology, and empathy. Associated with various emotions, alongside their constant use for human desires, flowers are turned into mere consumption objects, that conquered all homes, streets, parks and public spaces. Trapped into endless connotations, flowers are rarely considered beyond these aesthetical fictional meanings.

How the Wild Flowers Grow is a brief moment for pausing in an artist-made garden to think about flowers, their self-sufficient existence, and harmony. It wishes to remind the cycle of nature, by asking ‘how it grows’ that recalls the shared nature between all living beings. It tries to reflect the infinite forms of flowers in nature, as it takes shape in four million different species on earth. The imaginary drawings of wildflowers illustrate the untameable wilderness within each flower, with their crooked looks and unexpected twists. This totally imagined flower garden invites us to enter a meditative state where we, for a moment, open ourselves to the teaching of flowers; in their wise being, surrendered nature and harmony in plurality, as they cover all the mountains, hills and valleys.

Tobias Gutmann was born in Wewak, Papua New Guinea in 1987 and lives in Zürich, Switzerland. His MFA studies in Fine Arts at Zürich University of Arts broadened his interdisciplinary artistic practice. Gutmann enters playful spaces of flow, thinks with his hands and infinitely continues to draw repetitive variations of things to discover the beauty between normal. He uses his own visual language to give meaning, character, and atmosphere to a variety of formats such as installations, music-videos, publications, and workshops. Performing such formats both nationally and around the world, his art always hopes to affect people in a positive way and to communicate an incentive for participation.

Gözde Filinta is an experienced cultural producer with a master’s degree in art history and curating, acknowledged in curatorial projects. Specialized in initiating and leading research-based creative projects, collaborating with international artists and researchers. Skilled in writing articles, and interviews for various publications. Interested in post-human discourses, nonhuman agency in arts, interspecies relationships, animal studies, ecocritism, urgent planetary issues and fiction.